Mary felt the cold touch of intuition placing its hand on the case.
She wheeled her chair back to her desk and logged onto her database. She typed in the name provided her by Elyse Martinez along with the bogus phone number.
Two pages of entries spat out.
Mary read the list of names, locations, ages, social security numbers, and other particulars.
None of the names fit with a prominent businessman married to a woman named Elyse and with a daughter named Nina.
Mary was suddenly forced to confront the notion that the prominent businessman may not exist at all.
And if that was the case, Elyse Martinez was most likely not who she said she was.
It was time to put away the cell phone and the computer and get back to the real investigative work.
It was time to get some boots on the ground.
Or, in her case, it was time to get some fashionable, stylish, and affordably priced footwear on the ground.
Time was wasting.
19
Nineteen
The address Elyse had given her was located in West Hollywood.
Mary took Santa Monica Boulevard through Beverly Hills and then veered into the funkiness that was West Hollywood.
She made her way through the offbeat eclecticism of the infamous community, to the more traditional residential blocks, the few that existed in the area.
The house that bore Elyse’s address was a ranch-style bungalow with a weird front porch that looked more like a repurposed wheelchair ramp than any kind of actual structure.
Mary parked and went to the front door. She rang the bell, waited, then rang the bell again. Finally, she tried the door, but it was locked.
There was a small picture window in the center of the house, but the porch didn’t extend far enough for Mary to get a good look inside the place.
She walked to the back of the house, knocked on the door, tried to open it, but it was locked. She stood with her hands on her hips, wondering what to do.
Maybe Elyse just wasn’t home.
Maybe Elyse wasn’t really Elyse.
Mary glanced down at two potted flowers flanking the small back stoop. The flowers were dead. Clearly no one paid much attention to landscaping. The grass was long. Shrubs overgrown.
The potted flowers intrigued Mary. She reached out with her left foot and knocked one over.
Nothing.
She gave the one on the right a little nudge and it tipped over, revealing a stained house key and a few grub-like bugs.
Relatives of Lieutenant Davies, Mary thought.
She picked up the key, turned it inside the back door lock, and stepped inside.
Breaking and entering, yes. But she’d come to visit her client, smelled smoke, and thought someone might be inside. Yeah, maybe she would set something on fire just to make her story better.
Smoke would certainly smell better than the current aroma assailing her nostrils.
The smell of death was unmistakable. Every time she passed by Aunt Alice’s laundry hamper she was reminded of this.
The back door led directly into a kitchen. Vinyl floor, laminate counter peeling in places, and kitchen cabinets painted white but wearing years of grease that had turned them a faint yellow.
Mary walked quickly through the kitchen into the living room, where she found her client in no position to pay the final balance of her bill.
Elyse Ramirez was face down on a horrible, dark-green carpet, featuring a large semicircle of blood. Her knees were beneath her, arms at her side, in the class of pose the newspapers loved to refer to as execution-style.
Mary patted the woman’s pockets, looking for a cell phone, anything. But there was nothing: no purse, no keys, no sign the woman had been here with anything of a personal nature.
The question for Mary was, to whom did the house belong? She highly doubted it was Elyse’s, so who had managed to lure her here?
Mary had a bad feeling, the kind that zaps you like a static shock. Or the kind of cattle prod she had sometimes imagined using on Jake.
The jolt pushed Mary into action. She raced through the rest of the house, finding no signs of human life. Empty closets, empty rooms, no sign of a telephone anywhere.
On her way back through the kitchen, Mary spotted a small section of kitchen counter that was lower than the rest. Probably a desk, where people could sit and pay bills. She opened the drawer, but it was empty. Mary was about to shut it when she caught a quick flash of color. She pulled the drawer all the way out and found a card stuck in the back crack of the drawer, wedged deeply into the space.
Mary pulled it out.
Sol Landscaping Company.
She put it into her purse, backed out of the house, and got into her car.
Next stop: a pay phone and an anonymous tip for LAPD’s finest.
20
Twenty
Mary made the call to LAPD, using her Bea Arthur voice. Not very sexy really. Kind of like a bull dyke with a cold and a killer hangover. She told the dispatcher she’d heard a scream and a gunshot. Mary gave them the address too and then hung up before they could ask any more questions.
Sol Landscaping.
Mary looked at the card again. It was decent quality, but not super slick, like the kind produced by a huge landscaping conglomerate. The card had a little bit more of a mom-and-pop-type-operation impression to it.
She debated about just calling the number on the card. But according to the address, it was only a ten-minute drive.
Mary gunned the Accord, anxious to put some distance between herself and her former client.
The sight of a dead body always unsettled her. Sure, Mary could function, think straight (like making sure she didn’t leave any fingerprints anywhere in the house) but there was always a delayed reaction.
Elyse Ramirez, even if that had not been her real name, had been a beautiful woman. Vital, with intelligence and poise. She had struck Mary as the kind of woman who had plenty of plans and the means to make them come true.
But not anymore.
It took Mary less than ten minutes to find the address attributed to Sol Landscaping without a problem. It was down a side street off Wilshire, then down another long dirt alley that opened up to reveal an industrial yard with a few sheds, open grounds featuring piles of dirt, gravel, and what looked like trashed landscaping materials.
Mary parked in front of an aluminum-clad building that was more of a shack.
She went to the front door but found it locked. Through the door’s dust-covered window, she could see a makeshift office with two steel folding chairs, a printer, and a coffeemaker tipped on its side.
The sound of a high-pitched motor coming to life sounded to Mary like it was coming from behind the building. She thumbed the auto-lock on her car then walked around the aluminum shack.
“Can I help you?” a man’s voice said.
Mary turned to see a short, stocky, Hispanic man in green coveralls, tan boots, and a black baseball cap. He had a weedwhacker in his hand. There was a gas can and a small bottle of oil on the picnic table next to him.
“This is Sol Landscaping?” she said.
“Yes,” he said, a slight accent to his voice.
“Oh great, I’m looking for a good landscaper and you come highly recommended,” Mary said, “by my friend, Elyse Ramirez.”
The man peeked at her from beneath his ball cap. His eyes were black, and there were dark smudges on his face.
“Let me get the boss,” he said. He set the weedwhacker on the table and went into the building.